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Kindle DX, now with 9.7″ screen

Today Amazon announced availability of Kindle DX: Amazon’s 9.7″ Wireless Reading Device. It will start shipping sometime this summer and is available for pre-order now. As I’ll definitely would like to write a hands-on review of it I’m preordering one right now…

2 major differences in Kindle DX compared to Kindle 2 are: 9.7″ 16 shades of gray eInk screen that runs at 1200×824 resolution and native PDF support. Other notable new features include iPhone-like auto-rotate and flash-memory upgraded to 3.3 gigabytes.

Kindle DX is actually much anticipated “Kindle textbook edition”. According to Wall Street Jounal Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland along with 5 other universities will start piloting Kindle DX as a universal textbook. With 4 major textbook publishers (Addison Wiley, Prentice Hall, Person and Longman) on-board long with several smaller ones it’s expected that Kindle DX will have 60% of textbooks available when it ships. Larger screen would also be a bonus to people who are used to reading regular newspapers.

Here are all features and specifications of Kindle DX that I could dig up so far:

It’s *so* close to being right. The margin cropping, the supressable auto-rotate landscape display–very cool.

But it looks like you can’t search, highlight or annotate pdfs. Which means for my purposes it just won’t work, because I wanted it for reading academic journal articles. I need to be able to mark them up and search them for particular terms to get full use out of such a reader.

Having a physical disability, this device would have really helped me get around campus a lot easier. Hell, there were some days I simply couldn’t make it to class… If I’d had one of these instead of huge sack o’ book et. al. I know that I would have been able to make it class on those days.